But this was not all, for we made other visits.
Finally one day he opened his mouth upon the subject and said, “I’m buying too much. I must keep away from these stores.”
I thought so too, and wondered how he would find room enough in his trunks for all of the goods, and what the Costa Rica custom officers would do to him. I have since also been curious to know if his wife, after seeing these things, told him, as my wife told me when I presented my purchases, that she could have bought the same at home just as cheaply, and could have selected things she wanted. My wife would have perhaps obtained more at home for the money, but I would not have gotten the romance out of it. I needed the experience. A little chivalry toward one’s wife is worth more than money.
At home I never enter Chinese shops. Being busy, and therefore in a normal mental state, I act rationally and do not buy Chinese silks and jimcracks. But in Panama I had nothing useful to do, and was therefore apt to do things I should not have done. When the mind is preoccupied with buying stocks one buys them more or less freely and precipitately; when it is preoccupied with buying Chinese silks one is apt to buy more than one’s wife needs or wants.
The shrewd insurance agents, book agents, art venders and irresponsible promoters take advantage of this fact at home where you can not escape them. They take up so much of your time and talk so much about insurance, books, pictures or investments that they communicate to you their own paid-for enthusiasm on the subject. They hammer it into your brain cells by prolonged and repeated nerve impressions until the brain cells are temporarily modified to reproduce the impression involuntarily, so that “insure, insure,” or “buy, buy,” is continually running through your mind. You are hypnotized. The only way to determine whether you want an insurance policy or a book or a picture or a fortune from the agent or promoter, is to get away from him or her for forty-eight hours, and sleep over the problem twice. The impressions of the agent’s sonorous or perhaps insinuating voice will then have become weakened, and you will find that you do not want either an insurance policy, a book, a picture or a gold mine.
After lunch I went up to my room to take another private lesson in siestas. The barricading of the door, the removing of superfluous clothing, the careful tucking in of the mosquito bar under the mattress all around, futile efforts to stop thinking and keep from perspiring, and protracted attempts to read Spanish novels, made of the siesta a not insignificant part of the day’s work. It was not the dolce far niente, the Traeumerei, the dreamy dozing so dear to the imagination of degenerates. My character was unfortunately already formed; I had my limitations, and could not adapt and reconcile myself to the popular siesta hoax. A tropical siesta is not a sleep; it is a broil in which the victim does the turning over and seasoning himself.
Finally, however, at the end of an hour and a half by the cathedral clock, twelve hours by the hour-glass in my brain, I seemed to be well done, and slowly sizzled off into a simulated sunstroke, only to be awakened as on the day before by those knockout blows on my door. I aroused myself and saw the bell boy peeking in.
“The washing, the washing,” he said hastily, and was evidently anxious to anticipate and avoid the expected torrent of dreadful Spanish. But I was too discouraged to compose epithets. Epitaphs were more in keeping with the situation, and one was due him. So I crawled out of bed, made a toga out of a towel, removed the barricade from the door and took the bundle. I then wiped my forehead and looked at him. He stood like a black Pompeian statue with the white of its staring eyes fixed upon me. I began, “Nada, nada!”—and the thing glided out. It was becoming intelligent at last.
But it was still too hot to keep clothes on, and I had to crawl into my mosquito cage and make up my mind to stay there until the three o’clock breeze made itself felt. As the new year was only two days off, I passed the time making New Year’s resolutions. I made about a hundred, but could only remember a dozen or so of them afterward. I resolved:
Never to take a siesta or a dolce far niente in the future, but to be satisfied with a plain nap when I felt the need of it.